Licensing

Licensing

Anchoring evidence, running a Keeper, building an Actor or Claimant, and writing Norms: open, with no license to accept and no fee. The one licensed act is issuing assessment artifacts as a Referee operator, and even that is free under versions prior to v1.0.0.

No license, no fee

Implementing and operating Keeper (K), Actor (A), and Claimant (C) nodes, anchoring evidence, and authoring or publishing Norm Profiles need no license. RACKP commits not to assert its patents against these activities in its patent commitment. The Keeper and Claimant reference implementations are open source under the Apache License 2.0.

Referee (R) operators also pay no fee for:

  • All use under versions prior to v1.0.0.
  • Deployments not accessible to parties outside the operator's own organization (on-premises, VPN, air-gapped), regardless of volume.

From v1.0.0

Referee (R) operators pay a license fee of USD 1.00 per billable artifact (CONTRIBUTION_RESULT or POH_CERTIFICATE). The first 100 artifacts per operator are free. No application or approval is required to operate a Referee commercially, and RACKP's patent commitment covers Referee operation that complies with the LICENSE.

Operators who wish to continue beyond 100 artifacts without a fee (for example, academic research or registered non-profit use) can submit an exemption request before exceeding the threshold. The LICENSE is the authoritative text.